Brendon let out a war cry as he charged again.

Aspico and Patior had sent out the next order for what to do in the game, that being to just return to whatever your land was and get stronger.

Solve missions, defeat enemies, alchemize; whatever was needed of you. And for Brendon, that meant braving the nightmare that was his fleshy, fanged land. After making sure his gear was ready he headed to the Hill of Death, the sight of the consorts last stand against the denizen before they'd all been killed; reduced to the spirits they lived as now.

A massive boss monster called the Dreaded kept the last warriors of LoFaM from escaping.

Brendon believed that if he could defeat the Dreaded, he could inspire the other consorts and lead a charge into the Maw; a wall of massive fangs that he was certain hid the denizen. Brendon's axe collided with the leg of the Dreaded's leg, sending black fire across it.

It let out a hiss like several cows dying in unison and brought down a massive broadsword on top of him. He rose his axe to block it, managing to do so; but getting his feet wedged into the ground in the process.

He switched to his Super Shotty, firing both shots into the twisted body of the boss. It staggered back, switching to an axe of its own swinging hard. It cleaved through Brendon painfully, the Prince of Doom needing to rely on one of the new powers he'd discovered to survive the strike.

Sinister Sacrifice. The ability allowed him to destroy his own doom, keeping himself alive. It wasn't as good as Brendon had been hoping, as it only kept him alive and didn't actually heal him; but he figured he could get healing from his moirale later.

He put both weapons away and, following some advice Aspico had given him, he attempted to manifest his Prince of Doom powers more offensive. It formed in his hands as a bright glowing orb, a Death Bringer. It looked to him like a slightly more malicious version of a Spirit Bomb. He only managed to grow it about the twice the size of a ping-pong ball, launching it at the Dreaded.

Even with such small size, it still ate through a shocking amount of the monster's health bar dropping it into the red.

The Dreaded let out a painful shriek, grabbing at its flesh and pulling it off like it as just a cloak. A thick, black smog began pouring out of the holes, turning the body into a mass of sentient smoke. The sword and axe rose from the ground, evidently now able to attack independently while the smoke summoned dark spirits.

"Fuck me." Brendon grumbled as the rush of attacks came hurling at him.


Patior's sniper bullet killed the monster spawner at the top of the metal cube in one quick headshot.

The indego blood was kicking himself now that he was thinking clearly. What he needed to do seemed so obvious in retrospect.

Dumbass consorts with towns that rusted because they were made of shitty metal, massive metal cubes that didn't rust. He hadn't eve needed to use his new Mage of Mind Process ability to figure it out, he just needed to not get distracted plotting to murder people.

Granted, he was still getting distracted talking to Aspico, and was able to use his Process ability to focus on sniping the monsters around the cubes to clear a path for the consorts to harvest the metal and send messages to the olive blood at the same time.

They'd been alternating between casual conversation, actually catching up about what was going on with their lands and their lives, and somewhat impature bickering that both of them assured the other was completely platonic and not an attempt to revitalize their former pitch relationship; much the same way a nervous tsundere would claim not to live senpai.

But Patior really meant it of course. He was just getting annoyed by Aspico's constant insistence on bringing up how she categorized relationships and comparing it to his methods of categorizing information. No spade flirting whatsoever.


Furlok had finished with the frogs.

Well, at least she had finished the actual gathering of frogs. All that was left on that front was to let the ecto-biology machine within the frog temple crunch and blend the DNA to breed the Genesis Frog while she went off to train.

She wasn't sure what there was for her to do if not work on the frogs, as there weren't many monsters in the frog zone for her to fight. She came rather close to legitimately focusing on her painting for the first time in awhile; then remembered that there was an entire half of the planet that she had been neglecting up to now.

She grumbled as she returned to the marketplace half of LoMaF, immediately getting insults and accusations thrown at her from the consorts running the shops. She supposed it didn't help that she was in fact wearing a Thief's outfit now.

She'd alchemized it with her other garments now to up its stats-though she'd gone out of her way to keep the deep black of Space aspect-but it did still look very noticeably like Thief garment.

The consorts were so focused on threatening Furlok for what she might do, they didn't even seem to notice the underlings that were actually stealing from them.

She rolled her eyes, taking out her brushes to get to work clearing the marketplace of the monsters.


Java jumped over the Greater Drake, hovering above the golden scaled reptile before launching herself down at it and driving her brass knuckles into its skull.

There was a disquieting crack before the beast dissolved into grist. Java gathered it all quickly, then brought her hand back up to her headset.

She had it set up to talk to Arvis at any time, "Are you alright?" She asked, slightly nervous about how long she'd gone without saying anything. At least ten minutes fighting the mini-boss, and five getting up to the location to fight him.

"I'm alright Java," Arvis replied through the headset, "I was fine twenty minutes ago, and fine twenty minutes before that."

"Hey, considering everything that happened, it's not like being worried is unprecedented." Java said. According to Aspico, she and Arvis were oscillated, drifting back and forth between the red and pale quadrants as Java grew more protective of him.

"Frankly it's surprising you managed to get together at all," Aspico had said when they were talking before the training began, "Under normal circumstances, the things you'd done to him would be too much to handle and it wouldn't be a stable relationship. But Arvis seems astonishingly alright with you. Whether it's a matter of his classpect's natural ability, or just his love of you, not even I can say."

Even if Arvis was willing to so quickly forgive her for blindly following Patior's orders, Java wasn't quite ready to forgive herself. Not until she, Arvis, and everyone else were on the other side of this game.


Aspico was wondering through the wilderness of her land, her Soul Search ability letting her keep an eye on the world around her so she didn't crash into anything while the majority of her attention went into replying to Patior's messages.

She felt somewhat like she was back on Grubtube in heated arguments over which pairings in various shows were the best together.

All she'd done was bring up the slight similarities she'd noticed between her shipping system and Patior's filing system, and let him know about some of her old ships. That may have been a mistake in retrospect, but they were in the weeds now, and there was no going back until the argument was settled.

It was.. No, she wasn't going to say that it was exhilarating.

That was such a classic blackrom-romcom line that it might cause Aspico to collapse in on herself from sheer force of cliche.

But she couldn't deny she was enjoying herself. Infuriating as Patior was, he was a wonderful opponent in a debate. He didn't just spew nonsense like she tended to expect. He'd gotten smarter since the days of their ill fated spade fling, and she'd gotten more flexible in her topics of conversation.

Her thoughts were cut off slightly by her Soul Sense picking up on a very powerful source of life in the distance.

She drew her Pitch Peircer-the IRL symbolism of her having chosen to keep the weapon with its name and associated implications not lost on her as she headed out towards her new prey.


Dustine wasn't thrilled with the idea of leaving Risura on his land all alone again.

The last time that had happened he'd reportedly gone into a cave and come out of it a laughing, psychotic mess. But he promised that he would be alright, and Dustine turned his focus to his own land.

The purple aura of his Rage power pulsated around his body and his weapon and he went from town to town across his land.

Beforehand he'd just been fighting anyone who challenged him and putting no actual thought into it, but now he'd noticed something. In every town, there was one consort bigger and tougher than all the rest.

One that, with Dustine's help, was potentially strong enough to raise the moat bridge up. For what purpose, Dustine still had no idea. But it was too coincidental how there only one massive musclenaught to a town, and how there was always some consort willing to mention that before the denizen had riled up everyone, lifting the moat had been their job.

It was his task to get these toads moving. Well, more to trick them, getting their existing movement pointed towards something productive; even if it meant challenging him to a sparring match to get them going.

He'd had to do so several times already, and as he grappled the eight foot toad man, the purple aura of his Fortitude ability reinforcing his muscles so he could hold his ground, he was pretty sure he would have to for every town on LoMaW.


Lurabo held her Arcane aloft, focusing her psychokinesis through it to spread its natural magical blast out over the Swarm in front of her.

The Swarm's individual components didn't really exist, the creature a single mid-boss simply made up of multiple pieces.

Lurabo was hoping that the widespread blast would take the entire thing out faster.

Granted, there was always the chance of a few bits of the Swarm surviving and manifesting as specific winged enemies; but Lurabo had recently been informed of the power she had over chance.

She still wasn't sure if she was doing it right, but she tried to focus on steadily boosting her own natural luck as she fired the blast into the Swarm, and to her delight the entire mid-boss had just so happened to group together into a single mass when she'd fired, letting her burn the entire boss to death in a single strike.

She tried to keep her victory dance from being too nerdy, but she supposed it probably didn't matter since she was alone in the dark. Speaking of.. Luck was the only thing she could generate.

Her new powers made it possible to give off light, making her wonder if this was how Risura and the other jade bloods felt in the dark.

She supposed that there must be a reason to have such a specific ability. She could see the platforms that the spotlights were illuminating.

But.. what if there were platforms with no spotlight illuminating them...


Risura had been alternating between chatting with Dustine and exploring his land.

Well, exploring may have been a generous description of the chaotic death charge he was making across his land. Rather than ignore the chuckle-fucks in the town, he'd begun using his Rip ability to bust into their buildings and start asking questions.

He supposed it was probably a rather odd sight to see for those on the inside. He'd started looking at himself in the more lately, and despite his arms and legs being very visibly muscled, Mutosi really had been right. Jade bloods were ninety percent female, and it really did show in his feminine appearance.

He was able to afford taking note of such things, as he didn't actually need to focus on training much, as he fought with bare fists and had maxed out physical stats already. The consorts on his land had all been driven mad by something, and in similar ways to Risura himself when he'd returned from the cave.

The word 'Nyarlathotep' kept coming up when he tried questioning them. There wasn't any way to gather more information unfortunately, all the books on his land either burned for heat or scrawled over with nonsense.

Either way, he was starting to suspect that the denizen was not the only corruptive force on his land.

Nyarlathotep…


Jeff had spent even more time in the past and future now.

He'd spoken with versions of himself that had failed and, with Aspico and Patior's help, been able to make a list of all the things he would have to do in order to prevent the timeline from dooming itself.

It was an extremely long list, one making the Heir of Time wonder if all sessions had as many potential ways of fucking up, or if his friends were just that fucking volatile.

He wasn't sure which would be better or worse. He thought at first that he should get right to it, as it would be important to shorten that list as quickly as possible; then it occurred to him that he was a time travel, and he was already technically more than a year older than the other members of the session despite him not having been gone at all from their point of view.

Procrastination was so much easier when you could literally become time itself. Jeff decided to spend a bit of it in the present. He'd already figured out where all the keys were, might as well finish off the basic bosses and get the internal clock structure of this land going properly again.

The glimpses he'd seen when looking into doomed timelines had showed him some rather interesting clockwork enemies.


Valtina had already restored life to the majority of her land.

It had been her mission from the moment she'd figured out she was capable of healing. She was still somewhat embarrassed by how long it had taken her to figure out that the healing had been coming from her and not her magic gloves (said gloves had no healing powers whatsoever she realized, and instead converted her healing power into physical strength when she focused).

By her estimate about seventy percent of her land was already healed. She had been looking for more sections of ruined territory to heal when she'd stumbled upon a giant of an enemy; a thirteen foot tall musclenaught.

It was rooted to the ground, two hooked tails extending from the back, feathered arms, a painted clown face with a cyber eye, and a massive horn. Said horn didn't come from any of the sprites Valtina realized, and was just inherent in the Archeon enemies.

The Sylph of Life took out her Sawvel and Razor Spade. She supposed that she did need to keep her combat skills sharp if she didn't want to get relegated to pure healer.

That particular thought made her wonder if Brendon was alright at the moment. His land was dreadful from what he'd told her of it.

She blushed when she realized how embarrassingly pale she was being; even in the face of a massive beast that was trying to ensnare her with its powerful roots.


Arvis took cover from the turret sentry.

"You still doing alright?" Java asked him through the headset.

"I'm fine dear." Arvis said jokingly, "Just being shot by a living turret gun." He was glad that she and him were finally together.

Well, frankly he was just fine being a living sentient creature again as opposed to the husk he'd been reduced to by her powers. He knew it hadn't been her fault, even if she didn't seem to.

In the meantime, Arvis had decided to dedicate the majority of his time to being someone worthy of her being guilty over fucking with. He supposed he should endeavor to do something with the consorts, and had started by looking around the Blood Stone Mountains.

After beating the boss in the first mountain cave, he'd found an item; a piece of paper with a speech on it. Well, with a fragment of a speech on it. He'd sound another fragment at the end of the second mountain's cave.

He hoped that getting all the pieces would unlock some kind of special speech he could use to unite the consorts. Or at the very least get them to stop fucking throwing trash at him and each other anytime they were seen out in the open. Unfortunately there was a goddamn turret blocking this one.

"Go for whatever's powering it." Java suggested. Arvis clicked his tongue, glancing around the rock he was hiding behind. In the brief moment before he had to duck back behind the rock to avoid the several bullets being fired at him, he saw a core machine beneath the main guns of the turret.

He took out his hookshot and hook sword. This part would be a bit tricky..


Mutosi had been torn on what to do with the camel consorts.

She had agreed to return them all to their points of origin, but doing so would leave her without an army; and more to the point if her task had not been to brainwash all of them to free them from the confines of their BS faith system, then she had no idea what she was actually meant to be doing; and she didn't like the idea of essentially being back at square one with nothing to show for it but a slightly stronger broom and a new power.

She shuddered at the thought of actually having to research this land's shitty lore to figure out what the fuck she was supposed to do next. She wanted to be angry at something, but she couldn't even manage that because there was no one to be angry at but herself.

Sighing, she began the long, slow march to the starting point of her land. She stood at the head of the camel army this time though, figuring the least she could do was fight the monsters that arrived.

She wished Aspico hadn't reminded her that the consorts were actually living, sentient creatures. Things had been so much easier when she'd been able to just think of them as mindless, emotionless drones.

Now she'd have to get used to this whole 'empathy' thing.


Yes the next few chapters will just be various training stuffs. If you'd rather just skip to the fighting of the many denizens, I do have the story going forward plotted out, so let me know in the reviews. Assuming anyone aside from me even still cares about this fucking story XD